One room TWO SYSTEMS
“ It’s pure Bauhaus, what you’re sitting in here — the ‘Form Follows Function’ maxim,” says design engineer Ian McGrath as he leads us through this wildly impressive room,
“The functions here are sound and image, and the room must provide as near as possible the final mixed and mastered movie as laid down by its creators. The design development of a cinema needs to follow that edict if it’s to reach what’s bandied about as the ‘immersive experience’.”
Yet this room is not only a fully-immersive 7.2.4 Atmos home cinema; there is a separate high-end stereo system in the same space.
“Yes, it’s a hybrid room”, he explains. “I don’t think what we’re doing here has ever been attempted in quite the same way, to have such a high-end stereo monitoring room and cinema in the one space. It was certainly a high-wire act in design engineering terms. But I’ve worked in both those worlds: I’ve been been delivering film preview and recording studios for some time now. So I know that to achieve that there are rules of the game — in the room acoustics, how the speakers fire, how accurate and natural the audio and video system, even room colours and décor affect the contrast ratio and the colour depth.”
Getting the room right
“Then there is the budget allocation — equipment versus room build,” Ian continues. “It was clear to me there would be many competing budgets within the whole house construction, and it was just not an option to have ultra-expensive equipment firing into a financially-handicapped under-performing room that conflicted with the bespoke interiors within the rest of the house. I’d say we got the balance just right for this project.”
As you can see, it is
